Naturally Judge Rutherford gravitated towards the little house near Dupont Circle. The first night he mounted the stairs and found himself in the small room confronting the primitive supper he had been invited to share with big Tom and his family, his honest countenance assumed a cheerfulness long a stranger to it.
The room looked such a simple, homely place, with its Virginia made carpet, its neat, scant furnishing, and its table set with the plain little meal. The Judge’s homesick heart expanded within him.
He shook hands with Tom with fervour. Rupert he greeted with friendly affection. Sheba—on her entering the room with a plate of hot biscuits which she had been baking in Miss Burford’s stove—he almost kissed.
“Now this is something like,” he said. “I didn’t know there was anything so like Barnesville in all Washington city. And there wasn’t till you people brought it. I don’t know what it is, but, by thunder, it does a man’s heart good.”
He sat down with the unconventional air of ease he wore in Barnesville when he established himself in one of Jenny’s parlour chairs for the evening.
“Lord, Lord!” he said; “you’re home folks, and you’ve got home ways, that’s what it is. A month in one of these fashionable hotels would just about kill me. Having to order things written out on a card and eat ’em with a hundred folks looking on—there’s no comfort in it. Give me a place where you can all sit up together round the table and smell the good hot coffee and biscuit cooking and the ham and chicken being fried in the kitchen.”
Sheba had cooked the supper in Miss Burford’s kitchen. Her hot biscuits and coffee were made after Mornin’s most respected recipes, and her housewifely air was tenderly anxious.
“If it is not very good, Judge Rutherford,” she said, standing shyly at the head of the table before she took her place, “it is because I am only learning.”
“You have learned, Sheba,” said the Judge, looking at the plate of light golden brown and cream white biscuit with the sensitive eye of a connoisseur. “That plate of biscuit is Barnesville and Sophrony all over.”
Sheba blushed with joy.
“Oh, Uncle Tom,” she said; “do you think it is? I should so like to remind him of Barnesville.”
“Good Lord!” said the Judge. “Fact is, you’ve made me feel already as if Tom Scott might break out yelling in the back yard any minute.”
After the supper was over and the table clear the party of four sat down to talk business and make plans. The entire inexperience of the claimants was an obstacle in their path, but Judge Rutherford, though not greatly wiser than themselves, had means of gaining information which would be of value. As he looked over the papers and learned the details of the story, the good fellow’s interest mounted to excitement. He rubbed his head and grew flushed and bright of eye.
“By Jupiter, Tom!” he exclaimed, “I believe I can be of some use to you—I swear I believe I can. I haven’t had much experience, but I’ve seen something of this claim business, and if I set my wits to work I can find out from other fellows who know more. I’ll—” After a moment’s reflection. “I’ll have a talk with Farquhar to-morrow. That’s what I’ll do. Great Scott!” in a beaming outburst, “if I could push it through for you, how pleased Jenny would be.”
When he went away Tom accompanied him downstairs. Sheba and Rupert followed them, and all three found themselves lured out into the moonlit night to saunter with him a few yards down the light avenue, talking still about their fairy story. The Judge himself was as fascinated by it as if he had been a child.
“Why, it’s such a good story to tell,” he expatiated; “and there must be a great deal in that. I never heard a better story for gaining sympathy—that fine old Southern aristocrat standing by the Union in a red-hot secessionist town—actually persecuted on account of it. He was persecuted, wasn’t he?” he enquired of Rupert.
“Well,” Rupert answered, “everybody was furious at him, of course—all his friends. People who had known him all his life passed him in the street without speaking. He’d been very popular, and he felt it terribly. He never was the same man after it began. He was old, and his spirit gave way.”
“Just so!” exclaimed the Judge, stopping upon the pavement, elated even to oratory by the picture presented. “Fine old Southern aristocrat—on the brink of magnificent fortune—property turned into money that he may realise it—war breaks out, ruins him—Spartan patriotism—one patriot in a town of rebels hated and condemned by everybody—but faithful to his country. Friends—old friends—refuse to recognise him. Fortune gone—friends lost—heart broken.” He snatched Tom’s big hand and shook it enthusiastically. “Tom!” he said; “I’d like to make a speech to the House about it myself. I believe they would listen to me. How set up Jenny would be—how set up she’d be.”
He left them all in a glow of enthusiasm; they could see him gesticulating a little to himself as he walked down the avenue in the moonlight.
“That’s just like him,” said Tom; “he’d rather please Jenny than set the House of Representatives on fire. And he’d undertake the whole thing—work to give a man a fortune for mere neighbourliness. We were a neighbourly lot in Hamlin, after all.”
The Judge went home to his boarding-house and sat late in his shabby armchair, his legs stretched out, his hands clasped on the top of his rough head. He was thinking the thing out, and as he thought it out his excitement grew. Sometimes he unclasped his hands and rubbed his hair with restless sigh; more than once he unconsciously sprang to his feet, walked across the floor two or three times, and then sat down again. He was not a sharp schemer, he had not even reached the stage of sophistication which would have suggested to him that sharp scheming might be a necessary adjunct in the engineering of such matters as Government claims. From any power or tendency to diplomatise he was as free as the illustrative bull in a china shop. His bucolic trust in the simple justice and honest disinterestedness of the political representatives of his native land (it being granted they were of the Republican party) might have appeared a touching thing to a more astute and experienced person who had realised it to its limits. When he rubbed his hair excitedly or sprang up to walk about, these manifestations were indications, not of doubt or distrust, but of elated motion. It was the emotional aspect of the situation which delighted and disturbed him, the dramatic picturesqueness of it. Here was Tom—good old Tom—all Hamlin knew Tom and his virtues and witticisms—Lord! there wasn’t a man in the county who didn’t love him—yes, love him. And here was Sheba that Tom had been a father to. And what a handsome little creature she’d grown into—and, but for Tom, the Lord knew what would have become of her. And there was that story of the De Willoughbys of Delisleville—handsome, aristocratic lot, among the biggest bugs in the State—the fine old Judge with his thousands of acres lying uncultivated, and he paying his taxes on them through sheer patriarchal pleasure in being a big landowner. For years the Government had benefited by his tax-paying, while he had gained nothing. And then there was the accidental discovery of the splendid wealth hidden in the bowels of the earth—and the old aristocrat’s energy and enterprise. Why, if the war had not brought ruin to him and he had carried out his plans, the whole State would have been the richer for his mines. Capital would have been drawn in, labour would have been in demand—things would have developed—outsiders would have bought land—new discoveries would have been made—the wealth of the country’s resources would have opened up—the Government itself would have benefited by the thing. And then the war had ruined all. And yet the old Judge, overwhelmed with disaster as he was, had stood by the Government and had been scorned and deserted, and had died broken-hearted at the end, and here were his sole descendants—good old Tom and his little beauty of a protégée—(no, Sheba wasn’t a descendant, but somehow she counted), and this fine young De Willoughby—all of them penniless. Why, the justice of the thing stared a man in the face; a claim like that must go through.
At this juncture of his thought Judge Rutherford was standing upright in the middle of his room. His hair was in high disorder and his countenance flushed. He struck his right fist hard against the palm of his left hand.
“Why, the whole thing’s as straight as a string,” he said. “It’s got to go through. I’ll go and see Farquhar to-morrow.”
Farquhar was a cleverer man than the representative from Hamlin County. He had been returned several times by his constituents, and his life had been spent in localities more allied to effete civilization than was Barnesville. He knew his Washington and had an astute interest in the methods and characteristics of new members of Congress, particularly perhaps such as the rural districts loomed up behind as a background. Judge Rutherford he had observed at the outset of his brief career, in the days when he had first appeared in the House of Representatives in his new broadcloth with its new creases, and with the uneasy but conscientious expression in his eye.
“There’s a good fellow, I should say,” he had remarked to the member at the desk next to him. “Doesn’t know what to do, exactly—isn’t quite sure what he has come for—but means to accomplish it, whatsoever it may turn out to be, to the best of his ability. He’d be glad to make friends. He’s used to neighbours and unceremonious intimacies.”
He made friends with him himself and found the acquaintance of interest at times. The faithfully reproduced atmosphere of Barnesville had almost a literary colour. Occasionally, though not frequently, he encouraged delineation of Jenny and Tom Scott and Thacker and “the boys.” He had even inhaled at a distance vague whiffs of Sophronia’s waffles.
On the morning after the evening spent at Dupont Circle Judge Rutherford frankly buttonholed him in the lobby.
“Farquhar,” he said, “I’m chock full of a story. It kept me awake half the night. I want to ask your advice about it. It’s about a claim.”
“You shouldn’t have let it keep you awake,” replied Farquhar. “Claims are not novel enough. It’s my opinion that Washington is more than half populated just now with people who have come to present claims.”
Judge Rutherford’s countenance fell a little as the countenance of an enthusiast readily falls beneath the breath of non-enthusiasm.
“Well,” he said, “I guess there are plenty of them—but there are not many like this. You never heard such a story. It would be worth listening to, even if you were in the humour to walk ten miles to kick a claim.”
Farquhar laughed.
“I have been in them, Guv’nor,” he said. “The atmosphere is heavy with carpet-baggers who all have a reason for being paid for something by the Government. There’s one of them now—that little Hoosier hanging about the doorway. He’s from North Carolina, and wants pay for a herd of cattle.”
In the hall outside the lobby a little man stood gazing with pale small eyes intent upon the enchanted space within. He wore a suit of blue jeans evidently made in the domestic circle. He scanned each member of Congress who went in or out, and his expression was a combination of furtive eagerness and tentative appeal.
“I believe I’ve seen him before,” remarked Judge Rutherford, “but I don’t know him.”
“He’s been hanging about the place for weeks,” said Farquhar. “He’s always in the strangers’ gallery when claims come up for discussion. He looks as if he’d be likely to get what he has come for, Hoosier as he is.”
“I want to talk to you about the De Willoughbys,” said Rutherford. “I can’t rest until I’ve told someone about it. I want you to advise me what to do.”
Farquhar allowed himself to be led away into a more secluded spot. He was not, it must be confessed, greatly interested, but he was well disposed towards the member from Hamlin and would listen. They sat down together in one of the rooms where such talk might be carried on, and the Judge forthwith plunged into his story.
It was, as his own instincts had told him, a good story. He was at once simple and ornate in the telling—simple in his broad directness, and ornate in his dramatic and emotional touches. He began with the picture of the De Willoughbys of Delisleville—the autocratic and aristocratic Judge, the two picturesque sons, and the big, unpicturesque one who disappeared from his native town to reappear in the mountains of North Carolina and live his primitive life there as the object of general adulation. He unconsciously made Big Tom the most picturesque figure of the lot. Long before he had finished sketching him, Farquhar—who had been looking out of the window—turned his face towards him. He began to feel himself repaid for his amiable if somewhat casual attention. He did not look out of the window again. The history of big Tom De Willoughby alone was worth hearing. Farquhar did not find it necessary to call Judge Rutherford’s attention to the fact that Sheba and the mystery of Blair’s Hollow were not to be regarded as evidence. He realised that they adorned the situation and seemed to prove things whether it was strictly true that they did so or not. The discovery of the coal, the fortunes and disasters of Judge de Willoughby, the obstinate loyalty abhorred and condemned of his neighbours, his loneliness and poverty and death—his wasted estates, the big, bare, empty house in which his sole known heir lived alone, were material to hold any man’s attention, and, enlarged upon by the member from Hamlin, were effective indeed.
“Now,” said the Judge, wiping his forehead when he had finished, “what do you think of that? Don’t you think these people have a pretty strong claim?”
“That story sounds as if they had,” answered Farquhar; “but the Government isn’t eager to settle claims—and you never know what will be unearthed. If Judge De Willoughby had not been such a blatantly open old opposer of his neighbour’s political opinions these people wouldn’t have a shadow of a chance.”
“By Jupiter!” exclaimed Rutherford, delightedly; “he was persecuted—persecuted.”
“It was a good thing for his relatives,” said Farquhar. “Did you say the people had come to Washington?”
“All three of them,” answered the Judge, and this time his tone was exultant; “Tom, and Sheba, and Rupert. They’ve rented some little rooms out near Dupont Circle.”
“I should like to be taken to see them,” said Farquhar, reflectively. “I should like to have a look at Big Tom De Willoughby.”
“Would you?” cried the Judge. “Why, nothing would suit me better—or them either, for that matter. I’ll take you any day you say—any day.”
“It ain’t the easiest thing in the world to put a claim through,” said Farquhar. “It means plenty of hard knocks and hard work and anxiety. Do you know that?”
“I don’t know anything about it,” answered the Judge. “But I’m going to get this one through if there’s a way of doing it.”
“You’ll be misunderstood and called names and slandered,” said Farquhar, regarding his rugged, ingenuous face with some curiosity. “There may be people—even in Hamlin County—who won’t believe you are not up to some big deal. What are you doing it for?”
“Why, for Tom and Sheba and Rupert,” said the Judge, in an outburst of neighbourliness. “That’s folks enough to do it for, ain’t it? There’s three of ’em—and I’d do it for ary one—as we say in Barnesville,” in discreet correction of the colloquialism.
Farquhar laughed a little, and put a hand on his shoulder as they moved away together. “I believe you would,” he said; “perhaps that sort of thing is commoner in Barnesville than in Washington. I believe you would. Take me to see the claimants to-morrow.”
When Judge Rutherford piloted him up the broad, unpaved avenue towards the small house near Dupont Circle, the first objects which caught Farquhar’s gaze were two young people standing among the unkempt rose and syringa bushes in the little front garden. The slim grace and bloom of their youth would have caught any eye. They were laughing happily, and the girl held a branch of rosy blossoms in her hand.
“Are they the claimants?” Farquhar enquired.
“One of them is,” answered Rutherford. “But Sheba—Sheba counts somehow.”
Sheba looked at the stranger with the soft gaze of deer-like eyes when he was presented to her. There was no shyness in her woodland smile.
“Judge Rutherford,” she said, “Uncle Matt has come—Rupert’s Matt, you know. We can’t help laughing about it, but we can’t help being happy.”
The boyish Southern face at her side laughed and glowed. Matt represented to Rupert the Lares and Penates his emotional nature required and had been denied.
“If he were not such a practical creature,” he said, “I might not know what to do with him. But he worked his way here by engaging himself for the journey as a sort of nurse to an invalid young man who wanted to join his family in Washington and was too weak to travel alone.”
The further from romance the world drifts, the fairer it becomes in its fagged eyes. So few stories unfold themselves sweetly from beginning to end that a first chapter is always more or less alluring, and as he marked the youth and beauty of those two and saw how their young eyes and smiles met in question and response at every thought, to Farquhar, who still retained the fragments of an imagination not wholly blighted by the House of Representatives, it seemed rather as if he had wandered into a world where young Cupid and Psyche still moved and breathed in human guise. As central figures of a government claim, the pair were exquisitely incongruous. Their youth was so radiant and untried, their bright good looks so bloomed, that the man looking at them felt—with a realising sense of humour as well as fanciful sentiment—as if a spring wind wafted through a wood close grown with wild daffodils had swept into a heated manufactory where machinery whirred and ill-clad workers bent over their toil.
“Uncle Tom will be very glad to see you,” said Sheba, as they went into the house. “Judge Rutherford says you will tell us what to do.”
An interesting feature of the situation to Farquhar was the entire frankness and simplicity of those concerned in it. It was so clear that they knew nothing of the complications they might be called upon to face, that their ignorance was of the order of charm. If he had been some sharper claimant come to fleece them, their visitor knew this young dryad’s eyes would have smiled at him just as gratefully.
As they mounted the stairs, a huge laugh broke forth above, and when they entered the small sitting-room Uncle Matt stood before Big Tom, holding forth gravely, his gray wool bared, his decently shabby hat in his hand.
“I’d er come as lady’s maid, Marse Thomas De Willoughby,” he was saying, “ef I couldn’t er got here no other way. Seemed like I jest got to honin’ atter Marse Rupert, an’ I couldn’t er stayed nohow. I gotter be whar dat boy is—I jest gotter.”
Big Tom, rising to his full height to shake hands with his visitor, appeared physically to cast such disparagement on the size of the room as was almost embarrassing. Farquhar saw all his values as he met his honest, humourous eye.
“I’ve been talking to my nephew’s body-guard,” he said. “All right, Uncle Matt. You just go to Miss Burford and ask her to find you a shake-down. There’s always a place to be found for a fellow like you.”
“Marse Thomas De Willoughby,” said Matt, “dish yer niggah man’s not gwine to be in no one’s way. I come yere to work—dat’s what I come yere for. An’ work’s a thing dat kin be hunted down—en a man ain’t needin’ no gun to hunt it neder—an’ he needn’t be no mighty Nimrod.” And he made his best bow to both men and shuffled out of the room.
To Farquhar his visit was an interesting experience and a novel one. For months he had been feeling that he lived in the whirl of a maelstrom of schemes and jobberies, the inevitable result of the policy of a Government which had promised to recoup those it had involuntarily wronged during a national convulsion. Upon every side there had sprung up claimants—many an honest one, and hordes of those not honest. There were obvious thieves and specious ones, brilliant tricksters and dull ones. Newspaper literature had been incited by the number and variety of claims, and claims—to a jocularity which spread over all the land. Farquhar had seen most of the types—the greenhorn, the astute planner, the man who had a wrong burning in his breast, the man who knew how to approach his subject and the man who did not, the man who buttonholed everybody and was diffuse and hopeful, and the man who was helpless before the task he had undertaken. He had never, however, seen anything like the De Willoughby claimants—big Tom telling his straightforward story with his unsanguine air, the attractive youngster adding detail with simple directness, and the girl, Sheba, her roe’s eyes dilated with eager interest hanging upon their every word.
“It is one of the best stories I’ve heard,” he said to Rutherford, on their way back. “But it’s a big claim—it’s a huge claim, and the Government is beginning to get restive.”
“But don’t you think they’ll get it through?” exclaimed Judge Rutherford. “Ain’t they bound to get it? It’s the Lord’s truth—every word they speak—the Lord’s truth!”
“Yes,” answered Farquhar, “that’s how it struck me; but, as a rule, it isn’t the Lord’s truth that carries a big claim through.”
He broke into a short laugh, as if at an inward realisation of the aspect of the situation.
“They are as straightforward as a lot of children,” he said. “They have nothing to hide, and they wouldn’t know how to hide it if they had. It would be rather a joke if——” And he laughed again.
“If what?” asked Rutherford.
“Ah, well! if that very fact was the thing which carried them through,” his laugh ending in a shrewd smile.
This carried the ingenuous mind of his companion beyond its depth.
“I don’t see where the joke would come in,” he said, rather ruefully. “I should have thought nothing else would do it for them.”
Farquhar slapped him on the shoulder.
“So you would,” he said. “That’s why you are the best advocate they could have. You are all woven out of the same cloth. You stand by them—and so will I.”
Judge Rutherford seized his hand and shook it with affectionately ardent pumpings.
“That’s what I wanted to make sure of,” he said. “I’m going to work at this thing, and I want a man to help me who knows the ropes. Lord, how I should like to go back to Hamlin and tell Jenny and the boys that I’d put Tom through.”
And as they walked up the enclosed road to the Capitol he devoted himself to describing anew Big Tom’s virtue, popularity, and witticisms.
For weeks Talbot’s Cross-roads found itself provided with a conversational topic of absorbing interest. Ethan Cronan, who had temporarily “taken on” the post-office and store, had no cause to fear that the old headquarters was in danger of losing popularity. The truth was that big Tom had so long presided over the daily gatherings that the new occupant of the premises was regarded merely as a sort of friendly representative. Being an amiable and unambitious soul, Ethan in fact regarded himself in the same light, and felt supported and indeed elevated by the fact that he stood in the shoes of a public character so universally popular and admired.
“I ain’t Tom, an’ I cayn’t never come a-nigh him,” he said; “but I kin do my best not to cast no disgrace on his place, an’ allus tradin’ as fair as I know how. It’s a kinder honor to set in his chairs an’ weigh sugar out in the scales he used—an’ it drors trade too.”
During the passage of the first few weeks, horses, waggons, and ox-teams crowded about the hitching-posts, while excitement ran high at mail-time. The general opinion was that any post might bring the news that Congress was “sitting on” the great De Willoughby claim, and that Washington waited breathless for its decision. That all other national business should be suspended seemed inevitable. That any mail should come and go without bringing some news was not contemplated. The riders of the horses and owners of the waggons sat upon the stone porch and discussed probabilities. They told each other stories they had gathered of the bygone glories of the De Willoughbys, of the obstinate loyalty of the old Judge and the bitter indignation of his neighbours, and enlarged upon the strength of the claim this gave him to the consideration of the Government.
“Tom won’t have no trouble with his claim,” was the general opinion. “He’ll just waltz it through. Thar won’t be a hitch.”
But after the first letter in which he announced his safe arrival in the Capital City, Tom wrote no more for a week or so, which caused a disappointment only ameliorated by the belief that he was engaged in “waltzing” the claim through. Each man felt it necessary to visit the Cross-roads every day to talk over the possible methods employed, and to make valuable suggestions. Interest never flagged, but it was greatly added to when it was known that Judge Rutherford had ranged himself on Tom’s side.
“He’s the pop-larest man in Hamlin County,” it was said, “an’ he’s bound to be a pop’lar man in Congress, an’ have a pull.”
But when the summer had passed, and a touch of frost in the night air loosened the chestnuts in their burrs, and a stray morning breeze shook them in showers down upon the carpet of rustling yellowed leaves, Tom’s letters had become few and far between, and none of them had contained any account of the intentions of the legislative body with regard to the claim.
“There’s nothing to tell, boys,” he wrote. “As far as I’ve gone, it seems a man gets a claim through Congress by waiting about Washington and telling his story to different people until he wears them out—or they wear him out.”
For some time after this they did not hear from him at all. The winter set in, and the habitués of the Cross-roads Post-office gathered about the glowing stove. Under the influence of cold gray skies, biting air, leafless trees, and bare land, the claim seemed somehow to have receded into the distance. The sanguine confidence of the community had not subsided into doubt so much as into helpless mystification. Months had passed and nothing whatsoever had happened.
“Seems somehow,” said Jabe Doty one night, as he tilted his chair forward and stared at the fire in the stove, “seems somehow as if Tom was a right smart ways off—es ef he got furder as the winter closed in—a’most like Washin’ton city hed moved a thousand miles or so out West somewhars, an’ took him with it.”
To Tom himself it seemed that it was the old, easy-going mountain life which had receded. The days when he had sat upon the stone porch and watched the sun rise from behind one mountain and set behind another seemed to belong to a life lived centuries ago. But that he knew little of occult beliefs and mysteries, he would have said to himself that all these things must have happened in a long past incarnation.
The matter of the De Willoughby claim was brought before the House. Judge Rutherford opened the subject one day with a good deal of nervous excitement. He had supplied himself with many notes, and found some little difficulty in managing them, being new to the work, and he grew hot and uncertain because he could not secure an audience. Claims had already become old and tiresome stories, and members who were unoccupied pursued their conversation unmovedly, giving the speaker only an occasional detached glance. The two representatives of their country sitting nearest to him were, not at all furtively, eating apples and casting their cores and parings into their particular waste-paper baskets. This was discouraging and baffling. To quote the Judge himself, no one knew anything about Hamlin County, and certainly no one was disturbed by any desire to be told about it.
That night Rutherford went to the house near Dupont Circle. Big Tom was sitting in the porch with Rupert and Sheba. Uncle Matt was digging about the roots of a rose-bush, and the Judge caught a glimpse of Miss Burford looking out from behind the parlour curtains.
The Judge wore a wearied and vaguely bewildered look as he sat down and wiped his forehead with a large, clean white handkerchief.
“It’s all different from what I thought—it’s all different,” he said.
“Things often are,” remarked Tom, “oftener than not.”
Rupert and Sheba glanced at each other questioningly and listened with anxious eyes.
“And it’s different in a different way from what I expected,” the Judge went on. “They might have said and done a dozen things I should have been sort of ready for, but they didn’t. Somehow it seemed as if—as if the whole thing didn’t matter.”
Tom got up and began to walk about.
“That’s not the way things begin that are going to rush through,” he said.
Sheba followed him and slipped her hand through his arm.
“Do you think,” she faltered, “that perhaps we shall not get the money at all, Uncle Tom?”
Tom folded her hand in his—which was easily done.
“I’m afraid that if we do get it,” he answered, “it will not come to us before we want it pretty badly—the Lord knows how badly.”
For every day counts in the expenditure of a limited sum, and on days of discouragement Tom’s calculation of their resources left him a troubled man.
When Judge Rutherford had gone Rupert sat with Sheba in the scented summer darkness. He drew his chair opposite to hers and took one of her hands in both of his own.
“Suppose I have done a wrong thing,” he said. “Suppose I have dragged you and Uncle Tom into trouble?”
“I am glad you came,” in a quick, soft voice. “I am glad you came.” And the slight, warm fingers closed round his.
He lifted them to his lips and kissed them over and over again. “Are you glad I came?” he murmured. “Oh, Sheba! Sheba!”
“Why do you say ‘Oh, Sheba’?” she asked.
“Because I love you so—and I am so young—and I don’t know what to do. You know I love you, don’t you?”
She leaned forward so that he saw her lovely gazelle eyes lifted and most innocently tender. “I want you to love me,” she said; “I could not bear you not to love me.”
He hesitated a second, and then suddenly pressed his glowing face upon her palm.
“But I don’t love you as Uncle Tom loves you, Sheba,” he said. “I love you—young as I am—I love you—differently.”
Her swaying nearer to him was a sweetly unconscious and involuntary thing. Their young eyes drowned themselves in each other.
“I want you,” she said, the note of a young ring-dove answering her mate murmuring in her voice, “I want you to love me—as you love me. I love your way of loving me.”
“Darling!” broke from him, his boy’s heart beating fast and high. And their soft young lips were, through some mystery of power, drawn so near to each other that they met like flowers moved to touching by the summer wind.
Later Rupert went to Tom, who sat by an open window in his room and looked out on the moonlit stretch of avenue. The boy’s heart was still beating fast, and, as the white light struck his face, it showed his eyes more like Delia Vanuxem’s than they had ever been. Their darkness held just the look Tom remembered, but could never have described or explained to himself.
“Uncle Tom,” he began, in an unsteady voice, “I couldn’t go to bed without telling you.”
Tom glanced up at him and learned a great deal. He put a big hand on his shoulder.
“Sit down, boy,” he said, his kind eyes warming. Rupert sat down.
“Perhaps I ought not to have done it,” he broke forth. “I did not know I was going to do it. I suppose I am too young. I did not mean to—but I could not help it.”
“Sheba?” Tom inquired, simply.
“Her eyes were so lovely,” poured forth the boy. “She looked at me so like an angel. Whenever she is near me, it seems as if something were drawing us together.”
“Yes,” was Tom’s quiet answer.
“I want to tell you all about it,” impetuously. “I have been so lonely, Uncle Tom, since my mother died. You don’t know how I loved her—how close we were to each other. She was so sweet and wonderful—and I had nothing else.”
Tom nodded gently.
“I remember,” he said. “I never forgot.”
He put the big hand on the boy’s knee this time. “I loved her too,” he said, “and I had nothing else.”
“Then you know—you know!” cried Rupert. “You remember what it was to sit quite near her and see her look at you in that innocent way—how you longed to cry out and take her in your arms.”
Tom stirred in his seat. Time rolled back twenty-five years.
“Oh, my God, yes—I remember!” he answered.
“It was like that to-night,” the young lover went on. “And I could not stop myself. I told her I loved her—and she said she wanted me to love her—and we kissed each other.”
Big Tom got up and stood before the open window. His hands were thrust deep into his pockets and he stared out at the beauty of the night.
“Good Lord!” he said. “That’s what ought to come to every man that lives—but it doesn’t.”
Rupert poured forth his confession, restrained no more.
“From that first night when I rode through the mountains over the white road and stopped at your gate—since I looked up and saw her standing on the balcony with the narcissus in her hair it has always been the same thing. It began that very moment—it was there when she leaned forward and spoke to me. I had never thought of a woman before—I was too poor and sad and lonely and young. And there she was—all white—and it seemed as if she was mine.”
Tom nodded his head as if to a white rose-bush in the small garden.
“I am as poor as ever I was,” said Rupert. “I am a beggar if we lose our claim; but I am not sad, and I am not lonely—I can’t be—I can’t be! I am happy—everything’s happy—because she knows—and I have kissed her.”
“What did you think I would say when you told me?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know,” impetuously; “but I knew I must come to you. It seems a million years ago since that hot morning in the old garden at Delisleville—when I had never seen her.”
“One of the things I have thought about a good deal,” said Tom, with quite a practical manner, “has been love. I had lots of time to think over things at the Cross-roads, and I used to work them out as far as my mind would carry me. Love’s as much an element as the rest of them. There’s earth, air, fire, water—and love. It has to be calculated for. What I’ve reasoned out is that it has not been calculated for enough. It’s going to come to all of us—and it will either come and stay, and make the old earth bloom with flowers—or it will come and go, and leave it like a plain swept by fire. It’s not a trivial thing that only boys and girls play with; it’s better—and worse. It ought to be prepared for and treated well. It’s not often treated well. People have got into the way of expecting trouble and tragedy to come out of it. We are always hearing of its unhappiness in books. Poets write about it that way.”
“I suppose it is often unhappy,” said Rupert; “but just now it seems as if it could not be.”
“What I’ve been wanting to see,” said Tom, “is young love come up like a flower and be given its dew and sun and rain—and bloom and bloom its best.”
He drew a big sigh.
“That poor child who lies on the hillside under the pines,” he went on, “Sheba’s mother—hers was young love—and it brought tragedy and death. Delia,” his voice was unsteady, “your mother’s was young love, and her heart was broken. No, it’s not often well treated. And when you and Sheba came to me that night with your boy and girl eyes shining with gladness just because you had met each other, I said to myself, ‘By the Lord, here is what it springs from. Perhaps it may come to them; I wonder if it will?’”
“You thought it might, even then,” Rupert cried.
“Yes, I did,” was Tom’s answer. “You were young—you were drawn together—it seemed natural. I used to watch you, and think it over, making a kind of picture to myself of how it would be if two young things could meet each other and join hands and wander on among roses until they reached the gate of life—and it swung open for them and they passed through and found another paradise.”
He stopped a second and turned to look at Rupert’s dreamy face with a smile not all humorous. “I’m a sentimental chap for my size,” he added. “That’s what I wanted for Sheba and you—that’s what I want. That sort of thing was left out of my life; but I should like to see it before I’m done with. Good God! why can’t people be happy? I want people to be happy.”
The boy was trembling.
“Uncle Tom,” he said, “Sheba and I are happy to-night.”
“Then God have mercy on the soul of the man who would spoil it for you,” said Big Tom, with actual solemnity. “I’m not that man. You two just go on being happy; try and make up for what your two mothers had to bear.”
Rupert got up from his chair and caught the big hand in his. It was a boy’s action, and he looked particularly like a boy as he did it. “It is just like you,” he broke forth. “I did not know what you would say when I told you—but I ought to have known you would say something like this. It’s—it’s as big as you are, Uncle Tom,” ingenuously.
That was his good-night. When he went away Big Tom settled into his chair again and looked out for some time longer at the bright night. He was going back to two other nights which lay in the years behind. One was the night he turned his back on Delisleville and rode towards the mountain with a weight on his kindly heart which he had grimly told himself seemed to weigh a ton; the other was the night he had been wakened from his sleep by the knock on the door of the bedroom behind the Cross-roads Post-office and had ridden out under the whiteness of the moon to find in the bare cabin at Blair’s Hollow the little fair girl who had sobbed and died as she clung to his warm hand.
The world had heard and talked much of the Reverend John Baird in the years which followed his return to Willowfield. During the first few months after his reappearance among them, his flock had passed through a phase of restless uncertainty with regard to him. Certain elder members of his congregation had privately discussed questions of doctrine with anxiousness. Had not Nature already arraigned herself upon the man’s side by bestowing upon him a powerful individuality, heads might have been shaken, and the matter discussed openly instead of in considerately confidential conclave. It was, however, less easy to enter into argument with such a man than with one slow and uncertain of tongue, and one whose fortunes rested in the hands of the questioners. Besides, it was not to be denied that even the elderly and argumentative found themselves listening to his discourses. The young and emotional often thrilled and quaked before them. In his hour he was the pioneer of what to-day we call the modern, and seemed to speak his message not to a heterogeneous mental mass, but to each individual man and woman who sat before him with upturned face. He was daringly human for the time in which he lived, it being the hour when humanity was overpowered by deity, and to be human was to be iconoclastic. His was not the doctrine of the future—of future repentance for the wrongs done to-day, of future reward for the good to-day achieves, all deeds being balanced on a mercantile account of profit and loss. His was a cry almost fierce, demanding, in the name of human woe, that to-day shall hold no cruelty, no evil done, even to the smallest and most unregarded thing.
By some chance—though he alone realised the truth of the fact—the subjects of his most realistic and intense appeals to his hearers had the habit of developing themselves in his close talks with Latimer. Among the friends of the man on whom all things seemed to smile, the man on whom the sun had never shone, and who faithfully worshipped him, was known as his Shadow. It was not an unfitting figure of speech. Dark, gloomy, and inarticulate, he was a strange contrast to the man he loved; but, from the hour he had stood by Latimer’s side, leaning against the rail of the returning steamer, listening to the monotonously related story of the man’s bereavement, John Baird had felt that Fate herself had knit their lives together. He had walked the deck alone long hours that night, and when the light of the moon had broken fitfully through the stormily drifting clouds, it had struck upon a pallid face.
“Poor fellow!” he had said between his teeth; “poor darkling, tragic fellow! I must try—try—oh, my God! I must try——”
Then their lives had joined currents at Willowfield, and the friendship Baird had asked for had built itself on a foundation of stone.
There was nothing requiring explanation in the fact that to the less fortunate man Baird’s every gift of wit and ease was a pleasure and comfort. His mere physical attractions were a sort of joy. When Latimer caught sight of his own lank, ill-carried figure and his harshly rugged sallow face, he never failed to shrink from them and avert his eyes. To be the companion of a man whose every movement suggested strength and grace, whose skin was clear and healthful, his features well balanced and admirable in line—to be the friend of a human being built by nature as all human beings should be built if justice were done to them, was nourishment to his own starved needs.
When he assumed his charge at the squalid little town of Janway’s Mills, his flock looked askance at him. He was not harsh of soul, but he was gloomy and had not the power to convey encouragement or comfort, though he laboured with strenuous conscientiousness. Among the sordid commonness of the every-day life of the mill hands and their families he lived and moved as Savonarola had moved and lived in the midst of the picturesque wickedness and splendidly coloured fanaticism of Italy in dim, rich centuries past; but his was the asceticism and stern self-denial of Savonarola without the uplifting power of passionate eloquence and fire which, through their tempest, awakened and shook human souls. He had no gifts of compelling fervor; he could not arouse or warm his hearers; he never touched them. He preached to them, he visited them at their homes, he prayed beside their dying and their dead, he gave such aid in their necessities as the narrowness of his means would allow, but none of them loved him or did more than stoically accept him and his services.
“Look at us as we stand together,” he said to Baird on an evening when they stood side by side within range of an old-fashioned mirror. “Those things your reflection represents show me the things I was born without. I might make my life a daily crucifixion of self-denial and duty done at all costs, but I could not wear your smile or speak with your voice. I am a man, too,” with smothered passion; “I am a man, too! And yet—what woman looks smilingly at me—what child draws near unafraid?”
“You are of the severe monastic temperament,” answered Baird. “It is all a matter of temperament. Mine is facile and a slave to its emotions. Saints and martyrs are made of men like you—never of men such as I am.”
“Are you sure of the value to the world of saints and martyrs?” said Latimer. “I am not. That is the worst of it.”
“Ah! the world,” Baird reflected. “If we dare to come back to the world—to count it as a factor——”
“It is only the world we know,” Latimer said, his harsh voice unsteady; “the world’s sorrow—the world’s pain—the world’s power to hurt and degrade itself. That is what seems to concern us—if we dare to say so—we, who were thrust into it against our wills, and forced to suffer and see others suffer. The man who was burned at the stake, or torn in the arena by wild beasts, believed he won a crown for himself—but it was for himself.”
“What doth it profit a man,” quoted Baird, vaguely, but as if following a thought of his own, “if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
Latimer flung back his shock of uneven black locks. His hollow eyes flashed daringly.
“What doth it profit a man,” he cried, “if he save his own soul and lose the whole world, caring nothing for its agony, making no struggle to help it in its woe and grieving? A Man once gave His life for the world. Has any man ever given his soul?”
“You go far—you go far!” exclaimed Baird, drawing a short, sharp breath.
Latimer’s deep eyes dwelt upon him woefully. “Have you known what it was to bear a heavy sin on your soul?” he asked.
“My dear fellow,” said John Baird, a little bitterly, “it is such men as I, whose temperaments—the combination of forces you say you lack—lead them to the deeds the world calls ‘heavy sins’—and into the torment of regret which follows. You can bear no such burden—you have no such regret.”
Latimer, whose elbow rested on the mantel, leaned a haggard forehead on his hand.
“I have sinned,” he said. “It was that others might be spared; but I have put my soul in peril. Perhaps it is lost—lost!”
Baird laid a hand on his shoulder and shook him. It was a singular movement with passion in it.
“No! No!” he cried. “Rouse, man, and let your reason speak. In peril? Lost—for some poor rigid law broken to spare others? Great God! No!”
“Reason!” said Latimer. “What you and I must preach each week of our lives is that it is not reason a man must be ruled by, but blind, wilful faith.”
“I do not preach it,” Baird interposed. “There are things I dare to leave unsaid.”
“I have spoken falsely,” Latimer went on, heavily. “I have lived a lie—a lie—but it was to save pure hearts from breaking. They would have broken beneath the weight of what I have borne for them. If I must bear punishment for that, I—Let me bear it.”
The rigid submission of generations of the Calvinistic conscience which presumed to ask no justice from its God and gave praise as for mercy shown for all things which were not damnation, and which against damnation’s self dared not lift its voice in rebellion, had so far influenced the very building of his being that the revolt of reason in his brain filled him with gloomy terror. There was the appeal of despair on his face as he looked at Baird.
“Your life, your temperament have given you a wider horizon than mine,” he said. “I have never been in touch with human beings. I have only read religious books—stern, pitiless things. Since my boyhood I have lived in terror of the just God—the just God—who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children even to the third and fourth generation. I—Baird—” his voice dropping, his face pallid, “I have hated Him. I keep His laws, it is my fate to preach His word—and I cower before Him as a slave before a tyrant, with hatred in my heart.”
“Good God!” Baird broke forth, involuntarily. The force of the man’s desperate feeling, his horror of himself, his tragic truthfulness, were strange things to stand face to face with. He had never confronted such a thing before, and it shook him.
Latimer’s face relaxed into a singular, rather pathetic smile.
“Good God!” he repeated; “we all say that—I say it myself. It seems the natural human cry. I wonder what it means? It surely means something—something.”
John Baird looked at him desperately.
“You are a more exalted creature than I could ever be,” he said. “I am a poor thing by comparison; but life struck the wrong note for you. It was too harsh. You have lived among the hideous cruelties of old doctrines until they have wrought evil in your brain.”
He stood up and threw out his arms with an involuntary gesture, as if he were flinging off chains.
“Ah, they are not true! They are not true!” he exclaimed. “They belong to the dark ages. They are relics of the days when the upholders of one religion believed that they saved souls by the stake and the rack and thumbscrew. There were men and women who did believe it with rigid honesty. There were men and women who, believing in other forms, died in torture for their belief. There is no God Who would ask such demoniac sacrifice. We have come to clearer days. Somewhere—somewhere there is light.”
“You were born with the temperament to see its far-off glimmer even in your darkest hour,” Latimer said. “It is for such as you to point it out to such as I am. Show it to me—show it to me every moment if you can!”
Baird put his hand on the man’s shoulder again.
“The world is surging away from it—the chained mind, the cruelty, the groping in the dark,” he said, “as it surged away from the revengeful Israelitish creed of ‘eye for eye and tooth for tooth’ when Christ came. It has taken centuries to reach, even thus far; but, as each century passed, each human creature who yearned over and suffered with his fellow has been creeping on dragging, bleeding knees towards the light. But the century will never come which will surge away from the Man who died in man’s agony for men. In thought of Him one may use reason and needs no faith.”
The germ of one of the most moving and frequently quoted of Baird’s much-discussed discourses sprang—he told his friends afterwards—from one such conversation, and was the outcome of speech of the dead girl Margery. On a black and wet December day he came into his study, on his return from some parish visits, to find Latimer sitting before the fire, staring miserably at something he held in his hand. It was a little daguerrotype of Margery at fifteen.
“I found it in an old desk of mine,” he said, holding it out to Baird, who took it and slightly turned away to lean against the mantel, as he examined it.
The child’s large eyes seemed to light up the ugly shadows of the old-fashioned mushroom hat she wore, the soft bow of her mouth was like a little Love’s, she bloomed with an angelic innocence, and in her straight sweet look was the unconscious question of a child-woman creature at the dawn of life.
John Baird stood looking down at the heavenly, tender little face.
There was a rather long silence. During its passing he was far away. He was still far away when at length an exclamation left his lips. He did not hear his words himself—he did not remember Latimer, or notice his quick movement of surprise.
“How sweet she was!” he broke forth. “How sweet she was! How sweet!”
He put his hand up and touched his forehead with the action of a man in a dream.
“Sometimes,” he said, low and passionately, “sometimes I am sick with longing for her—sick!”
“You!” Latimer exclaimed. “You are heart-sick for her!”
Baird came back. The startled sound in the voice awoke him. He felt himself, as it were, dragged back from another world, breathless, as by a giant’s hand. He looked up, dazed, the hand holding the daguerrotype dropping helplessly by his side.
“It is not so strange that it should come to that,” he said. “I seem to know her so well. I think,” there was a look of sharp pain on his face—“I think I know the pitiful childlike suffering her dying eyes held.” And the man actually shuddered a little.
“I know it—I know it!” Latimer cried, and he let his forehead drop upon his hands and sat staring at the carpet.
“I have heard and thought of her until she has become a living creature,” John Baird said. “I hear of her from others than yourself. Miss Starkweather—that poor girl from the mills, Susan Chapman—you yourself—keep her before me, alive. I seem to know the very deeps of her lovingness—and understand her. Oh, that she should have died!” He turned his face away and spoke his next words slowly and in a lowered voice. “If I had found her when I came back free—if I had found her here, living—we two might have been brothers.”
“No, no!” Latimer cried, rising. “You—it could not——”
He drew his hand across his forehead and eyes.
“What are we saying?” he exclaimed, stammeringly. “What are we thinking of? For a moment it seemed as if she were alive again. Poor little Margery, with her eyes like blue flowers, she has been dead years and years and years.”
It was not long after this that the Reverend John Baird startled a Boston audience one night by his lecture, “Repentance.” In it he unfolded a new passionate creed which produced the effect of an electric shock. Newspapers reported it, editorials discussed it, articles were written upon it in monthly magazines. “Repentance is too late,” was the note his deepest fervour struck with virile, almost terrible, intensity. “Repent before your wrong is done.”
“Repentance comes too late,” he cried. “We say a man saves his soul by it—his soul! We are a base, cowardly lot. Our own souls are saved—yes! And we hug ourselves and are comforted. But what of the thing we have hurt—for no man ever lost his soul unless he lost it by the wound he gave another—by inflicting in some other an agony? What of the one who has suffered—who has wept blood? I repent and save myself; but repentance cannot undo. The torture has been endured—the tears of blood shed. It is not to God I must kneel and pray for pardon, but to that one whose helplessness I slew, and, though he grant it me, he still has been slain.”
The people who sat before him stirred in their seats; some leaned forward, breathing quickly. There were those who turned pale; here and there a man bent his head and a woman choked back a sob, or sat motionless with streaming eyes. “Repentance is too late—except for him who buys hope and peace with it. A lifetime of it cannot undo.” The old comfortable convention seemed to cease to be supporting. It seemed to cease to be true that one may wound and crush and kill, and then be admirable in escaping by smug repentance. It seemed to cease to be true that humanity need count only with an abstract, far-off Deity Who can easily afford to pardon—that one of his poor myriads has been done to death. It was all new—strange—direct—and each word fell like a blow from a hammer, because a strong, dramatic, reasoning creature spoke from the depths of his own life and soul. In him Humanity rose up an awful reality, which must itself be counted with—not because it could punish and revenge, but because the laws of nature cried aloud as a murdered man’s blood cries from the ground.
As Baird crossed the pavement to reach his cab, the first night he delivered this lecture, a man he knew but slightly stepped to his side and spoke to him.
“Mr. Baird,” he said, “will you drive me to the station?”
Baird turned and looked at him in some surprise. There were cabs enough within hailing distance. The man was well known as a journalist, rather celebrated for his good looks and masculine charm. He was of the square-shouldered, easy-moving, rich-coloured type; just now his handsome eye looked perturbed.
“I am going away suddenly,” he said, in answer to Baird’s questioning expression. “I want to catch the next train. I want you to see me off—you.”
“Let us get in,” was Baird’s brief reply. He had an instant revelation that the circumstance was not trivial or accidental.
As the door closed and the cab rolled away his companion leaned back, folding his arms.
“I had an hour to pass before keeping an appointment,” he said. “And I dropped in to hear you. You put things before a man in a new way. You are appallingly vivid. I am not going to keep my appointment. It is not easy not to keep it! I shall take the train to New York and catch to-morrow’s steamer to Liverpool. Don’t leave me until you have seen me off. I want to put the Atlantic Ocean and a year of time between myself and——”
“Temptation,” said Baird, though he scarcely realised that he spoke.
“Oh, the devil!” exclaimed the other man savagely. “Call her that if you like—call me that—call the whole thing that! She does not realise where we are drifting. She’s a lovely dreamer and has not realised that we are human. I did not allow myself to realise it until the passion of your words brought me face to face with myself. I am repenting in time. Don’t leave me! I can’t carry it through to-night alone.”
John Baird leaned back in the corner of the carriage and folded his arms also. His heart was leaping beneath them.
“Great God!” he said, out of the darkness. “I wish someone had said such words to me—years ago—and not left me afterwards! Years ago!”
“I thought so,” his companion answered, briefly. “You could not have painted it with such flaming power—otherwise.”
They did not speak again during the drive. They scarcely exchanged a dozen words before they parted. The train was in the station when they entered it.
Five minutes later John Baird stood upon the platform, looking after the carriages as they rolled out noisily behind trailing puffs of smoke and steam.
He had asked no questions, and, so far as his own knowledge was concerned, this was the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. But he knew that there had been a story, and there might have been a tragedy. It seemed that the intensity of his own cry for justice and mercy had arrested at least one of the actors in it before the curtain fell.
A few nights later, as they sat together, Baird and Latimer spoke of this incident and of the lecture it had followed upon.
“Repentance! Repentance!” Latimer said. “What led you to dwell upon repentance?”
“Thirty years of life,” was Baird’s answer. “Forty of them.” He was leaning forward gazing into the red-hot coals. “And after our talk,” he added, deliberately. “Margery.”
Latimer turned and gazed at him.
Baird nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Her picture. Her innocent face and the soft, helpless youth of it. Such young ignorance is helpless—helpless! If in any hour of ruthlessness—or madness—a man had done such tenderness a wrong, what repentance—what repentance could undo?”
“None,” said Latimer, and the words were a groan. “None—through all eternity.”
It was not a long silence which followed, but it seemed long to both of them. A dead stillness fell upon the room. Baird felt as if he were waiting for something. He knew he was waiting for something, though he could not have explained to himself the sensation. Latimer seemed waiting too—awaiting the power and steadiness to reach some resolve. But at length he reached it. He sat upright and clutched the arms of his chair. It was for support.
“Why not now?” he cried; “why not now? I trust you! I trust you! Let me unburden my soul. I will try.”
It was Baird’s involuntary habit to sink into easy attitudes; the long, supple form of his limbs and body lent themselves to grace and ease. But he sat upright also, his hands unconsciously taking hold upon the arms of his chair as his companion did.
For a moment the two gazed into each other’s eyes, and the contrast between their types was a strange one—the one man’s face dark, sallow, harsh, the other fine, sensitive, and suddenly awake with emotion.
“I trust you,” said Latimer again. “I would not have confessed the truth to any other living creature—upon the rack.”
His forehead looked damp under his black locks.
“You would not have confessed the truth,” Baird asked, in a hushed voice, “about what?”
“Margery,” answered Latimer. “Margery.”
He saw Baird make a slight forward movement, and he went on monotonously.
“She did not die in Italy,” he said. “She did not die lying smiling in the evening sun.”
“She—did not?” Baird’s low cry was a thing of horror.
“She died,” Latimer continued, in dull confession, “in a log cabin in the mountains of North Carolina. She died in anguish—the mother of an hour-old child.”
“My God! My God! My God!”
Three times the cry broke from Baird.
He got up and walked across the room and back.
“Wait—wait a moment!” he exclaimed. “For a moment don’t go on.”
As the years had passed, more than once he had been haunted by a dread that some day he might come upon some tragic truth long hidden. Here he was face to face with it. But what imagination could have painted it like this?
“You think my lie—a damnable thing,” said Latimer.
“No, no!” answered the other man, harshly. “No, no!”
He moved to and fro, and Latimer went on.
“I never understood,” he said. “She was a pure creature, and a loving, innocent one.”
“Yes,” Baird groaned; “loving and innocent. Go on—go on! It breaks my heart—it breaks my heart!”
Remembering that he had said “You might have been my brother,” Latimer caught his breath in a groan too. He understood. He had forgotten—forgotten. But now he must go on.
“At home she had been always a bright, happy, tender thing. She loved us and we loved her. She was full of delicate gifts. We are poor people; we denied ourselves that we might send her to Boston to develop her talent. She went away, radiant and full of innocent gratitude. For some time she was very happy. I was making every effort to save money to take her abroad that she might work in the studios there. She had always been a delicate little creature—and when it seemed that her health began to fail, we feared the old terrible New England scourge of consumption. It always took such bright things as she was. When she came home for a visit her brightness seemed gone. She drooped and could not eat or sleep. We could not bear to realise it. I thought that if I could take her to France or Italy she might be saved. I thought of her day and night—day and night.”
He paused, and the great knot in his throat worked convulsively in the bondage of his shabby collar. He began again when he recovered his voice.
“I thought too much,” he said. “I don’t know how it was. But just at that time there was a miserable story going on at the mills—I used to see the poor girl day by day—and hear the women talk. You know how that class of woman talks and gives you details and enlarges on them? The girl was about Margery’s age. I don’t know how it was; but one day, as I was standing listening to a gossipping married woman in one of their squalid, respectable parlours, and she was declaiming and denouncing and pouring forth anecdotes, suddenly—quite suddenly—I felt as if something had struck me. I turned sick and white and had to sit down. Oh, God! what an afternoon that was! and how long it seemed before I got back home.”
He stopped again. This time he wiped sweat from his forehead before he continued, hoarsely:
“I cannot go over it—I cannot describe the steps by which I was led to—horrid fear. For two weeks I did not sleep a single night. I thought I was going mad. I laid awake making desperate plans—to resort to in case—in case——!”
His forehead was wet again, and he stopped to touch it with his handkerchief.
“One day I told my mother I was going to Boston to see Margery—to talk over the possibility of our going abroad together with the money I had worked for and saved. I had done newspaper work—I had written religious essays—I had taught. I went to her.”
It was Baird who broke the thread of his speech now. He had been standing before a window, his back to the room. He turned about.
“You found?” he exclaimed, low and unsteady. “You found——?”
“It was true,” answered Latimer. “The worst.”